Nor’easter Hits Region

Jake Desmarais of Bond Auto Parts installs a winter windshield wiper on a customer's car during Thursday's storm. The storm made driving nearly impossible but just about everyone took it in stride – or stayed home. Photo by Christopher Roy

ORLEANS COUNTY - Nasty! That was the word for many Northeast Kingdom residents who braved yesterday's blizzard to get to work or do shopping. Many people stayed home.
Plow trucks scraped off as much as they could, but at the rate the snow was falling, the work seemed like a futile effort. In the meantime, a number of drivers had a hard time staying on the road.
The National Weather Service Office (NWS) in South Burlington received a report of seven inches of new snow in Newport City by mid-afternoon. The storm started Wednesday night and was expected to continue into the early morning hours Friday.
Eric Evenson, a meteorologist for NWS, said the storm is a Nor’easter but he wouldn’t go so far as to call it a massive storm.
“The highest totals that we have seen so far have been anywhere from 10 to 16 inches, but that’s nowhere near any sort of record,” said Evenson. “I wouldn’t necessarily call it a massive Nor’easter, but just call it a Nor’easter that produced heavy snow over a pretty large area of northern New England. It’s late December, it’s winter and we get snowstorms."
The storm seems worse because the area didn't get much snow last year, he said. “For some seeing this amount of snow all in one shot, it seems significant, but it’s not out of the norm.”
Things went well for the Derby office of the Vermont Agency of Transportation. Crews started working early Thursday and continued working throughout the day. The biggest problem was wind that blew snow into the roads.
Early afternoon a state dispatcher at the Derby barracks said there were no problems. Later on, the scanner reported at least one crash in Coventry.